This is... acceptable.
Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia
451–460 of 478 posts
Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia
#452Oh no, not that, anything but that. In all seriousness I hope this drives the less informed in Australia to seek out actual news sources and break out of the echo chamber that is Facebook. And I hope it forces Facebook to actually support journalism instead of leeching off of it. You can't have a robust democracy without a robust fourth estate.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing to stop “Facebook journalists.”
All of those keyboard warriors in the comments will start summarizing news articles and sharing them on pages or in groups.
It will make the echo chamber effect worse, not better.
Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fb may have overshot. They've not only blocked news pages but gov pages as well. Most people I know in aus have been getting covid updates purely through government body social media posts. These are now blocked.
>> They've not only blocked news pages but gov pages as well. Couldn't this be a viewed as a criminal act by the Australian government? Could they arrest FB employees in Australia for FB HQ blocking their pages, especially with the vital COVID-19 information?
They didn't block their pages, they decided not to provide free hosting for them.
Those services are perfectly free to have their own websites that are not paid for or promoted by Facebook.
Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people would agree that paying for the obligation to drive traffic to someone else's business without a choice in the matter is unjust.
That's an unfair summary of the situation. They push ads against 3rd party content shown on their site.
No, it's not. There is no "3rd party content", it's just links, the basis for the internet. Anyone can stop their site from being indexed with one line of code if they're not happy with the value proposition. Google offered to stop indexing all Australian news sites altogether but that was deemed illegal because this is nothing but a forcible cash grab by a dying media monopoly that has the Australian government by the balls.
Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So doesn't Australia have any process to compel the government to comply with the constitution? Australia has the most volatile politics of any English speaking country. The two ways for a government to be forced to follow the constitution is for the Queen to fire them, or for a military coup. Both were considered during the last time the government was in deadlock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_con…
OK, so the constitution's optional. No problem violating it then. If you don't like what the government did, I don't mind you sharing your opinion. But how does it logically connect with my comment that you replied to? I thought you were giving an example showing that voters are not well informed and I pointed out that it's not objectively wrong, just different from what you want.
No thats literally part of the constitution. The prime minister can get fired by the queen legally and its happened iniving memory.
Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding is that even a headline with a link counts. I've also heard that, unlike Facebook, Google doesn't have the option to say no. It'll be interesting to see if the newspapers start arguing that Facebook should be exempt, once all of their traffic from Facebook dries up.
> Google doesn't have the option to say no What does that mean? Surely Google could remove their entire presence from Australia if they felt like it.
I mean I believe they don't have the option to just not include links to news sites, which is what Facebook is doing.
Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Having an image recognition algorithm identify Africans and South Asians as gorillas doesn't happen because the designers intended it, but because their training data had only light-skinned human faces and dark-skinned primates. But the effect is racist even though this wasn't the intent. This isn't racism at all. It's just bad PR because humans take the implication that calling black people monkeys is calling them…
I’m not an expert in this, but I think racists call black people apes, not just because they think they are stupid, but because they think they are sub-human. Blacks don’t reach the intelligence and blah to be human. I think that’s what racists drive at when they call someone a monkey, and that’s why it’s so offensive. It would also make your theoretical AI racist, as it identified blacks as not human. Honestly, at t…
This isn't theoretical: Google Photos was identifying Black people as gorillas, and they didn't fix it, they worked around the bug by removing "gorilla" as a possible label in 2018. Some here seem to be saying that we can't call this racist unless someone specifically intended to do this because of hate. It's not subjective when someone's own face is so flagged.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-go...
Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Having an image recognition algorithm identify Africans and South Asians as gorillas doesn't happen because the designers intended it, but because their training data had only light-skinned human faces and dark-skinned primates. But the effect is racist even though this wasn't the intent. This isn't racism at all. It's just bad PR because humans take the implication that calling black people monkeys is calling them…
I’m not an expert in this, but I think racists call black people apes, not just because they think they are stupid, but because they think they are sub-human. Blacks don’t reach the intelligence and blah to be human. I think that’s what racists drive at when they call someone a monkey, and that’s why it’s so offensive. It would also make your theoretical AI racist, as it identified blacks as not human. Honestly, at t…
> It would also make your theoretical AI racist, as it identified blacks as not human.
That isn't how racism works. It's like saying that an AI that misclassifies a bat as a bird is racist. It's not racism, it's just error.
And it's not a race-specific error, it's a general error for which someone cherry picked the instances that imply a racially motivated intent that doesn't actually exist.
Calling it racism is pointless and misleading because there is no race-specific cause or solution to the problem. The solution is completely identical to the one for the same error in the general case, i.e. get more training data.
Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I agree with you but I am still scared of racism. My suspicion is that the concern with machine learning over racism is rooted in two things. The first is just the general modern trend of accusing anything you don't like of being racist, because everybody hates racism and wants to fight it. And the second is the fear on the part of people who make a living fighting racism that machine learning might actually put th…
> My suspicion is that the concern with machine learning over racism is rooted in two things. The first is just the general modern trend of accusing anything you don't like of being racist, because everybody hates racism and wants to fight it. And the second is the fear on the part of people who make a living fighting racism that machine learning might actually put them out of a job. I don't get to how you go from th…
It isn't the data that's biased. If you're hiring a computer scientist and disproportionately few black people have a degree in computer science, the data is not lying about who the qualified applicants are and the algorithm can't change that.
To fix that you have to cause more black high school students to go to college and study computer science and then wait two generations until their proportionality in the installed base of qualified computer scientists reaches parity. There is no magic wand that makes it happen overnight.
But concentrating on the places where it can't be solved instead of the places where it can will make it take even longer.
Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an unfair summary of the situation. They push ads against 3rd party content shown on their site.
No, it's not. There is no "3rd party content", it's just links, the basis for the internet. Anyone can stop their site from being indexed with one line of code if they're not happy with the value proposition. Google offered to stop indexing all Australian news sites altogether but that was deemed illegal because this is nothing but a forcible cash grab by a dying media monopoly that has the Australian government by t…
This article [1] (which I found because someone else linked to it in this thread), explains the situation well. Google & FB do not just link.
> Part of the issue here is Google and Facebook don’t just collect a list of interesting links to news content. Rather the way they find, sort, curate and present news content adds value for their users.
> They don’t just link to news content, they reframe it. It is often in that reframing that advertisements appear, and this is where these platforms make money.
> For example, this link will take you to the original 1989 proposal for the World Wide Web. Right now, anyone can create such a link to any other page or object on the web, without having to pay anyone else.
> But what Facebook and Google do in curating news content is fundamentally different. They create compelling previews, usually by offering the headline of a news article, sometimes the first few lines, and often the first image extracted.
[1] https://theconversation.com/webs-inventor-says-news-media-ba...